CHAPTER THREE
The Strange Career of Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
The Segregation of Racial and
Economic Policies

The nation responded to the Alabama events with the Civil
Rights Act, introduced in 1963 and signed into law in 1964. Implementing Title VII, the provision banning employment discrimination, would preoccupy the uswa and
the steel industry for the next ten years.
1 The union had
been a constant champion; the industry, with the rest of the business community, thought Title VII was unnecessary, but did not actively oppose it. Thus, it
was ironic that the law bedeviled the union as well as the company. The source
of the problem was that Title VII was intellectually thin and its enforcement
instrument, the Economic Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc),
powerless. Title VII prohibited employment discrimination but did not tackle
the structural sources of black unemployment. The eeoc could talk, but not
act. Title VII was enforced by private lawsuits, which prolonged and hardened
conflicts. In 1972, when eeoc obtained the power to file lawsuits, it simply followed paths laid out earlier.

Those paths had returned the ignored structural issues to the agenda under
the guise of an expanded definition of racial discrimination. Litigation in steel
addressed situations where, despite the abolition of racial rules, modernization
and shrinking employment had combined to produce less change than reformers had originally envisioned. To meet this situation, civil rights lawyers
expanded the idea of racial discrimination to justify policies designed to
protect blacks from the results of automation, poor education, and structural

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.